


Viribus

by outofreach



Category: Fallout 4
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-12
Updated: 2017-04-12
Packaged: 2018-10-18 02:22:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10607307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/outofreach/pseuds/outofreach
Summary: “That’s outstanding news soldier,” he stuttered, and then he actually smiled. A dazzling, perfect-white-teeth-and-dimples grin. For a hot minute she felt like she was watching one of those old flicks she used to love, with the ruggedly handsome actors she couldn’t take her eyes off of. She mentally cursed herself, shaking out of her ridiculous daze. She was in the real world now, talking to a possible enemy--regardless of what helooks like-and flicks didn’t exist anymore. Besides, the Commonwealth was fresh out of movie butter popcorn.





	

**Author's Note:**

> purely self indulgent story about one of my sole survivors.  
> this was originally intended to be one part, but i think i'll make it 2 or 3.
> 
> "viribus" is latin for strength

Charlotte had heard of Nate Farmer before she met him. They went to the same high school, and she was pretty sure he lived in the neighborhood one over from her mother’s salon. He wasn’t popular like she was--what with his attitude always ready like a quick pull of a hair trigger, and that motorcycle he whipped around the school parking lot late at night--but she liked him. Maybe all those flicks she dragged her friends to on Saturday nights had eaten through her brain. The ones where the slick greaser impresses the pretty girl by quipping some classic love poem all quiet to her in the back of the classroom. The ones where he buys her pink roses because they remind him of the curl of her lips. She was never quick to remind herself that those types of movies usually ended in tragedy--the jilted jock ex-lover brings a knife to the fist fight and kills the leather jacket hero. She tells herself that it’s just unrealistic, but in truth she never much believed in sad endings.  
  
The sucker for romance and trouble that she is, she can hardly keep her eyes off of Nate when she catches him in the hall between classes. And maybe it’s just all that sugar in the Nuka Cola talking, but she could swear that he’s looking right back at her sometimes.  
  
It’s about a year of this, of lovelorn gazes and cautious teasing from her friends before she meets Nate-- _really_ meets him.  
  
It’s after school, and Charlotte’s chattering with her friends around that baby blue convertible Janet Williams just got for her sixteenth birthday. Nate’s just a few yards from them, leaning against his motorcycle and dragging a cigarette. She notices him-- _of course_ she notices him--and this time she’s sure that he’s noticing her too. Her friend Lucy is talking about volleyball practice when he finally shifts his weight off his ride and comes striding over to her group, roiling like a dark cloud just before a lightning strike. Her brown eyes don’t stray for a second from his blue--and she’s just realized, he’s got blue eyes, sharper than the crash of waves around her family’s vacation home in Maine--and then he’s just a few feet in front of her. There’s a tense coil in the air around them, as her friends finally get the clue that Nate Farmer just crossed into the entirely wrong social circle and was staring straight at Charlotte. There was a beat, maybe a thousand of them, before the greaser rolled his shoulders and broke the silence.  
  
“Charlotte, right?”  
  
It felt straight out of those flicks, the whole parking lot seemed to go silent as they watched little, sweet Lottie Gray and the societal menace look at each other like they’d never seen a real person before. Her throat felt dry, her face hot as he politely waited for her overdue answer--and you can bet that she didn’t miss the way he nervously shuffled his feet.  
  
“Yeah,” she choked out, finally. “Nate, right?”  
  
“Yeah,” he mimicked, and because the air there seemed to be working its hardest to coil itself around their necks he proposed something that would shift the future of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. “Hey, uh, you want to get out of here?”  
  
And because Charlotte Gray was no fool, she said: “Yes.”

\---

When she first meets Danse, he’s looking at her the same way her daddy had once when he caught her sneaking in at four AM with purple love marks smattering her neckline. Shock. Confusion. A lot of disapproval. Bottom line is she’s familiar with the feeling.  
  
It hadn’t been that long since she'd woken up--and damn that just doesn’t seem like the right term to describe peeling her despairing carcass out of a giant surprise icebox--and this was only her second real firefight. She still couldn’t figure out how to aim her pistol right, and she’s sure as hell never seen these walking corpses around before. _Ghouls_ she hears the soldiers call them. “Feral” ghouls. Wouldn’t it be so much easier to just call them zombies?  
  
But their names were the least of her problems. She knows what she must look like to the titan looming over her, and he keeps asking her questions she’s not too sure how to answer. It was enough trouble trying to get Preston to believe her sci-fi tragedy backstory, and he was much more... _amiable_ than the three soldiers staring at her like she’s got two heads. (Though she supposes in this state of the world, that would probably be much more likely than whatever the hell she was.)  
  
“Does it really matter?” she leveled finally, after being bombarded with about a thousand questions. “I just helped you fight these ghouls.”  
  
He stares at her for a moment, looking a little like he just took too big a swig of flat Nuka Cola before his eyes settled and he nodded. “I suppose that’s fair.”  
  
He introduces himself then, gesturing with those clunky armored hands, as Paladin Danse of the Brotherhood of Steel. She physically restrains herself from rolling her eyes.  
  
“I’m Charlie,” she offers, sticking out a hand. He looks a little out of place for a moment, before extending his arm and taking her smaller palm into his own awkwardly. If he didn’t look so damn uncomfortable, she would’ve laughed.  
  
As it is, she exchanges polite pleasantries with the Paladin, and then again with the Scribe and the Knight.  
  
Rhys is obviously wary of her, even more so than Danse, but she supposes after just waltzing into their base with nothing but a 10mm pistol and a dog, that it’s only fair. Haylen is however much friendlier, and Charlie hits it off with her immediately. She supposes there’s something to be said for that female pack mentality.  
  
She realizes she must look terrible, because after only a few minutes of chatting with the Scribe, Danse makes his way over to them with a sleeping bag rolled under his arm.  
  
“We have a spare bag here if you’d like to stay for the night,” he gruffs. “We have rations to spare too if you get hungry. When you wake up tomorrow, I have a proposition for you if you’re willing to hear it?”  
  
For such a seasoned soldier he has an uncertainty to his voice, and she can’t pinpoint whether it’s distrust or honest to god nerves. She supposes it doesn’t matter really, because she is exhausted and the Commonwealth has grown dark and cold by now and she really wasn’t looking forward to the trek through that danger. So under the circumstances, she nods and offers a quiet thank you as he sets the bag on the table in front of her. Signaling a salute to Haylen, and an incline of his head to her, he lumbers off to the opposite side of the station for the night.  
  
“What should I be expecting in the morning?” she questions the other woman, but is disappointed to find a similar look of bewilderment in the other’s blue eyes.  
  
“Honestly, I have no idea,” Haylen shrugs before pulling herself to her feet and giving a languid stretch. “Best to hit the hay now though. We get up pretty early around here.”  
  
Haylen helps her unfurl her sleeping bag, and even gives her some baggy clothes to sleep in before settling into her own bag. It is almost unsettlingly quiet as Dogmeat curls at the foot of her bag, but she still drifts off to sleep much easier in the shelter of the station.  
  
She dreams of iceboxes though, and men with scars and sandpaper voices. She dreams of pistols and slumped bodies. Of babies crying in strange hands. She wakes up at the bang of a gunshot in the back of her mind. The station is not as quiet as before, she can hear the pattering of rain on the hard metal outside. She stares at the ceiling for hours. She doesn’t fall asleep again that night.

\---

As it turns out, Nate doesn’t know any love poems. He actually has to stop himself from laughing out loud at her when she asks him to recite her one. But he does sing sweet songs to her when they’re alone. Whispers Inkspots lyrics to her dreamily when they have late weekend nights sitting on lonely hills overlooking the city. So she doesn’t mind it too much.  
  
He doesn’t buy her flowers either, but it’s not because he doesn’t like them. One night he points to a lone daisy on a patch of grass by her driveway.  
  
“I’m dedicating that flower to you,” he says to her matter of factly.  
  
“Why?” she hums, curling her fingers through his greased back hair.  
  
“It’s just like you,” he mused. “All prim and proper and pretty on the outside--when you’re not really looking at it, like this in the dark, you just see the white. The nice, easy white that don’t get in anybody’s way. But then when you’ve got a good peek at it, you get that flash of yellow. That fire burning in it’s center. That’s you doll. All fire on the inside.”  
  
She has an incredible urge to kiss that lopsided grin he shoots her, and so she does.  
  
“For someone who hates love poetry so much, you’ve got a way with your words,” she teases, and he only shrugs like the smug ass he is. He pulls her head into the crook of his neck and is content to just sit with her a while, before the sun comes back up and he has to make his hasty escape back to the motorcycle he’s parked practically a mile from her house. She leans into his ear, “Why don’t you go pick it for me. I like daisies, I want to keep it.”  
  
He shifts under her gaze, the apology heavy in his shoulders. “Ah I can’t do that. S’not for me to pull something so nice out of where it wants to be. Besides, you take it into your house and it’ll wither and die. Won’t be the same anymore for you Charlie.” And he kisses her again.  
  
That’s another thing he does that she didn’t expect--calls her Charlie. She’s never been called that before, but the minute the name left his lips for the first time she realized that she never wanted to be called anything else again. But her friends hate it. So does her family. She has to fight off the urge to cringe when they call her Lottie.  
  
She knows it’s not just the name that they hate.  
  
Jessica hasn’t talked to her since she caught she and Nate necking in the back booth of Slocum Joes. Nancy’s been avoiding her too after the first day she came to school on the back of his motorcycle.  
  
Her friend’s hate is easily avoided enough. Her family’s though, is a different story.  
  
She truly had tried to hide her relationship from her parents, but of course her no good older brother ratted her out as soon as he heard about it at school. After nearly a month of clever subterfuge too.  
  
She wished that she lived in Boston. These little towns on the outskirts were too small--everybody knew everybody. In Boston she could’ve lied about who Nate Farmer was. Here though, there was no attempting it. Everyone knew Nate Farmer, her parents included.  
  
Her dad was furious of course, but his anger was nothing in comparison to the whirlwind that was her mother. She had never heard her speak such a way before, with that mad tone of condemnation towards her. Towards Nate. It was almost unbearable, but she wasn’t in any way unprepared for the onslaught.  
  
She was, however, caught thoroughly off guard by her brother’s own rebuttal at school the next day.  
  
It was just after gym when she heard it in the locker room.  
  
“I heard the Gray boys are jumping Nate Farmer today,” a tall, pigtailed blonde had clumsily whispered to the smaller brunette beside of her.  
  
“What for?” the shorter one asked back, a little too loudly.  
  
“Heard he was fooling around with their sister, took advantage of her or something I think. I hope they get him good.”  
  
Charlie was on the two in a split second, mustering up the most intense glare she could manage.  
  
“Where is this happening?” she demanded, louder again a second time when they just gawked at her.  
  
“I heard it was during Farmer’s lunch period,” the blonde squawked. “They said they were gonna get him while he’s having a smoke.”  
  
She hardly gave the gangly girl time to finish her sentence before she was rushing past them, tossing her belongings haphazardly on the floor.  
  
Nate had his lunch period the same time she had gym. He would sneak in sometimes and wait out behind the bleachers to steal a kiss from her when she was on the sidelines. He hadn’t visited her today, and that had her stomach churning.  
  
She had always been athletic, so it hardly took her any time to sprint towards the cafeteria and then out the exit doors. For one panicked second, she didn’t know where to start looking. He could’ve literally gone anywhere around the school to take a smoke, and she didn’t know about any favorite spots. Before she was halfway through deciding to make a full circle around the building, she heard a coughing to her right. She whipped her head in the noise’s direction, and saw light smoke wafting from behind a dumpster. Her legs already started halfway against the distance before she even registered she was moving.  
  
He didn’t look surprised to see her, but it was hard to really tell what expressions he was making with his face all bloody and broken like that.  
  
“Charlie,” he said, and she sank to her knees.  
  
He was battered, blood running down his nose and mouth and right into his used-to-be-clean white t-shirt. He had propped himself against the side of the dumpster, and was holding a lit cigarette between shaking fingers. She tried to assess the damage, but she couldn’t see through all of the _blood._  
  
“My brothers?” she whispered.  
  
“Yeah,” he chuckled, a dry sound entirely void of humor.  
  
“Did they...did they stab you?”  
  
“Nah,” he tried to shake his head before stopping and making a pained face at the movement. “Just didn’t expect them. Two of them, one of me. Wasn’t much of a rumble honestly.”  
  
“You should’ve stabbed them,” she shook her head bitterly, and couldn’t stop the hot swell of tears beginning to stream down her cheeks even for his sake.  
  
He laughed for real then, drawing a shaky breath from his cigarette. “I don’t carry a blade.”  
  
She moves closer to him, still on her knees. She tries to take a better look over him now that she’s closer, and maybe it’s just the swell of her emotions but somehow it seems to look even worse up close. She wraps her arms around his shoulders gingerly and cries against his neck. His hand finds her waist and he holds her, best he could in his condition.  
  
“Why didn’t you run?” she whispers between the choking sobs tearing their way up her throat. “You should’ve run.”  
  
“Hey,” he coaxes, and she felt ridiculous that he was the calm one in this situation. “You and me--we’re fighters. We don’t mind taking a deck for what we love. We don’t run. Never run.”  
  
She looks at him then, searching those dark eyes for _something_ , she didn’t know what, before sighing.  
  
He was going to be the end of her.

\---

Charlie was out of bed far before the rest of her fellow bunkers. Dogmeat laid curled up in the folds of the sleeping bag while she took advantage of the rations she had been offered the night before. The sun was just barely peeking through the windows of the station, and it was mornings like these when she remembers just how much she missed coffee. (And waking up to baby screams and Nate’s nightmares. Never in her life would she have guessed there would come a time where she craved mornings like those.)  
  
She doesn’t have to endure the solitude for too long though. A gruff yawn sounds from the other side of the station, and she hears the telltale signs of joints popping in a stretch.  
  
She almost doesn’t recognize the man that shuffles stiffly into the lobby. She obviously knew that Danse was still a human being stuffed somewhere in all that power armor, but for some reason she just couldn’t piece together the thought of him ever exiting it.  
He hadn’t once left it the entire day before, she was even sure he had gone to bed in that metal prison. But here we was, decidedly much less intimidating in those baggy pants and ripped t-shirt. Charlie wasn’t blind though--she wasn’t sure she’d ever seen such a fine example of the term “rippling pectorals”, and yeah maybe he wasn’t a goddamn giant without that suit on, but he still easily towered over her. He reminded her of some of the actors she used to see on TV, broad and beautiful-- _and what the fuck_ was that spark that just shot through her stomach when his eyes caught hers. It wasn’t a feeling she entirely recognized. It had been a long time since it had visited her. When the soldier started to make his way towards her though, she shoved that thought down into the box of “things she will never think about again”.  
  
“I didn’t expect you to be up so early,” Danse clipped in a voice so curt it almost sounded like she was in trouble.  
  
She realized then what it must look like. Her wolfing down food at the crack of dawn, already dressed back in her vault suit with her pistol clipped to her hip. He must’ve thought she was going to make a break for it. And in all honesty, she really _should_ be. She has a lot more important things to worry about than this bizarre parody of a military.  
  
“Good morning to you too Paladin,” she mused back, trying to keep an easy tone as she rolled her shoulders. “I’ve always been an early riser.”  
  
He looks at her incredulously, but doesn’t try to argue. Instead he sits down at the chair in front of her, raking his hands through his messy hair. (And he looks so young now, without that damn hood on.)  
  
“You had a proposition for me, right?” she gestures towards him, desperate to keep this uneasy alliance between the vault dweller and the police station businesslike. She felt a little like a mercenary, a thought which didn’t bother her as much as it maybe should.  
  
“Ah, yes,” he nodded, drumming his fingers against the table. “Have you ever heard of ArcJet Systems?” She shook her head. “Well, there’s a mission I need to complete there. I _could_ do it on my own, but it’d be unnecessarily risky. If you’d be willing, I’d like to ask your help to complete it.”  
  
She must have done a poor job at masking her surprise, as he was quick to interject before she could answer with a harder face.  
  
“The Brotherhood will compensate you, if that’s what it will take. I’m not so naive that I would expect you to help out of the goodness of your heart.”  
  
He says it like it’s an insult, but in truth, he’s right. Why would she, a complete wide-eyed stranger, take on a dangerous mission for nothing in return?  
  
“What about Haylen and Rhys? Why wouldn’t they help you?” Danse hadn’t given her a reason to distrust him yet, but she learned fast in this new world that you don’t wait for a reason.  
  
“We need to keep our hold on this station. I wouldn’t risk leaving only one man here.”  
  
She figures it’s a sound enough reason, and in truth, she needs all the caps she can get. He’s unprepared for her to say yes she gathers, based on the way his eyebrows shoot up. But he collects himself--ever the soldier--and offers her a simple: “Outstanding”.

 

ArcJet is...well, it is not exactly what she expected.  
  
She was tough enough to not completely freak out when the metal humanoids started to pour out of the fucking woodwork and shoot at her with ridiculous energy weapons. One shot skims her shoulder and she’s never been shot before, and she decides right then that she would like to keep that up. When the ambush is over, Danse curses under his breath about the “Institute” and their “damn synths”. She asks him what any of that even means and he tells her, but it only confuses her more. There’s not much time for more questions then because she hears another tinny voice calling out “motion sensor detected” and Danse has her and Dogmeat scrambling for cover.  
  
Danse is surprisingly patient with her inexperience, but she still doesn’t miss the steadily growing exasperation behind his eyes as she takes multiple shots to take down a single synth. She gets better though, as they keep going down, and she even gets to the point where she feels good enough about her marksmanship that she starts blaming her mishaps on the shitty quality of her pistol. Danse even agrees with her.  
  
When she sets him on _fucking fire_ however, she is expecting that forgiving patience to be at the end.  
  
Really, she thinks it’s his fault. She warned him she was pressing the button. The countdown was loud enough to be heard over battle. He could’ve easily gotten to her before the doors shut. Before the engine fried him like an egg.  
  
When it was over, she rushed out of the control room like a madman, Dogmeat close at her heels. She was sure he was dead--he _had_ to be dead. No way anyone could survive that.  
  
But he wasn’t. Maybe a little worse for wear, but he was alive. He only took two minutes to collect himself before he was up again, ready to start the charge. She could’ve sworn she could smell burnt hair as they rode the elevator back up.  
  
After that stunt, she expected him to refuse to pay her once it was all over. She had already decided by the time they reached the surface that that was fair, and she wouldn’t dispute him. I mean, she basically test fired a nuclear engine on his face. That was probably a good excuse not to pay her 200 caps.  
  
She was surprised by the soldier once again though, when not only did he pay her her caps, but he also gifted her a rifle.  
  
“From my personal collection,” he nods, and if he catches the way she rolls her eyes at the name “Righteous Authority” he doesn’t say a thing about it.  
  
He continues to catch her off guard by offering her a position amongst the Brotherhood of Steel.  
  
She’s grateful for the gun, she is. And she even likes Danse and Haylen--maybe not Rhys so much. But the thought of her little boy tugs at the back of her mind, and the look on Nate’s face as he stared fearlessly straight down a gun barrel.  
  
“I...have to think about it,” she admits, and he tells her it’s fine. To take all the time she needs.  
  
They don’t meet again for another three months.

\---

Nate didn’t tell her about the letter for a week. She should’ve been angry with him, and maybe she was, but she couldn’t feel anything beyond that twist in her stomach and the shake of legs.  
  
She had collapsed pitifully when she finished reading it, knees crashing to the kitchen tile of their little apartment. He kneeled next to her, holding her shoulders as she sobbed into her hands. It was ridiculous really--once again she was the blubbering mess in need of comfort from him in the face of his doom.  
  
She didn’t believe in the war, she never had. Her brother had been described as valiant by her friends and family when he freely signed on to the fight. She thought he was stupid. “A fucking moron” she called him, and he laughed and laughed. She wondered if he was still laughing at her from the grave, with the enemy soldier’s bullet lodged in his brain tissue.  
  
“They can’t make you go,” she said softly.  
  
“It’s the draft doll,” he retorted, voice cold. “I don’t have a choice.”  
  
“There’s always a choice,” she brought her hand to his face, looking into those deep blue eyes that could be so easily snuffed out. “We can run--yes, we’ll run away. We can go to Mexico or even Canada, I don’t care. Just...away from here, away from Boston, and away from this goddamn war.”  
  
He looked her over, and for a moment she thought he was genuinely considering it. But he eventually sighed, and kissed the top of her head in apology.  
  
“Remember what I always told you Charlie,” he murmured against her hair. “We don’t run.”  
  
She beats her fists against the floor until they’re bloody.

\---

**Author's Note:**

> comment, kudos, and critiques always appreciated. also this was not beta read, so if anybody is up for that job hit me up.
> 
> "fortem" is latin for brave


End file.
